The needle drops, and for a fleeting, disorienting moment, you wonder if you’ve cued up the wrong record. This isn’t the strutting, blues-scarred defiance of the world’s greatest rock and roll band. This is something else entirely: a tinkling, music-box arpeggio, clean and crystalline, quickly joined by the sweeping, saturated warmth of a full string section. Before Mick Jagger’s voice even arrives, “She’s A Rainbow” announces itself as a beautiful, calculated anomaly in The Rolling Stones’ formidable catalogue.
I first heard this piece of music late on a Saturday night, years ago, through a pair of inexpensive but beloved headphones. It was a revelation. It felt like walking into a grand, forgotten ballroom where the dust motes danced in beams of colored light. It’s an easy song to underestimate, often dismissed as the Their Satanic Majesties Request album’s most blatant nod to the prevailing psychedelic winds—the one where the Stones most directly responded to Sgt. Pepper’s. Yet, to call it mere imitation misses the point of its deeply committed strangeness and its undeniable, aching melodicism.
A Glitch in the Blues Matrix: Album Context
To understand “She’s A Rainbow,” you must first understand the 1967 maelstrom that birthed the parent album. Their Satanic Majesties Request arrived in December 1967, a bewildering, self-produced, and somewhat haphazardly assembled response to the zeitgeist, following a year of major drug busts and cultural upheaval for the band. After years defined by raw R&B grit and Keith Richards’ scorching guitar riffs, this album saw the Stones briefly pivot toward lysergic experimentation, dropping their long-time manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham in the process.
It’s a crucial context. The band, in a state of chaos and creative flux, essentially produced the record themselves, with engineering handled by the legendary Glyn Johns. This lack of a strong external hand led to both moments of indulgence and flashes of genuine, unexpected genius. “She’s A Rainbow,” released as a single in the US, where it reached the US Top 25, is decidedly the latter. It is the track that commits most fully to the beautiful, baroque sensibility that flitted around the edges of late-period psychedelia.
The Architecture of Color: Sound and Instrumentation
The true star of this arrangement isn’t Jagger, whose vocal delivery is unusually soft and almost submerged in the mix, nor is it the rhythm section of Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, who provide a restrained, almost gentle swing. The defining sound is Nicky Hopkins’ exquisite piano. His recurring, rapid-fire arpeggio figure—that signature music-box motif—is the song’s spine, a delicate, cascading sequence that immediately captures the ear. It’s a moment of technical, classical grace amidst a band known for its unvarnished rock and roll sincerity.
Against this light foundation, the arrangement swells into a gorgeous baroque-pop landscape. This is where Brian Jones’s instrumental curiosity comes into play, likely utilizing the Mellotron to lay down some of the initial, eerie orchestral textures. Crucially, a professional string arrangement was layered in, reportedly orchestrated by the uncredited John Paul Jones, years before he helped build the monument that would become Led Zeppelin. The strings are not just filler; they are foundational, providing a majestic, cinematic sweep that elevates the song far above standard psychedelic fare.
The guitar work, primarily from Keith Richards on acoustic, is supportive and understated, strumming cleanly to propel the tempo without demanding attention. Even the percussion—Watts’s drumming is precise and less explosive than usual, complemented by tambourine and reportedly hand claps—serves the orchestral vision. The production, typical of the Olympic Studio sound of that era, is deep and rich, lending itself perfectly to a quality premium audio system where every layer of the multi-tracked instrumentation can be clearly discerned.
“The song itself is a perfect little jewel box of structure, a dazzling anomaly where the grit and sleaze of the Stones are momentarily forgotten, replaced by a kind of fragile, hopeful grandeur.”
The structure is simple, yet the textures are impossibly complex. The shifts in dynamics are subtle: the strings fade and swell, allowing the piano to step forward for the verse, then rising again for the chorus. It feels meticulously sculpted. Every element, down to the slightly hazy, dreamy reverb on Jagger’s voice, contributes to the feeling of a vibrant, almost dizzying sensory overload, perfectly matching the lyrical imagery of a woman coming “in colours everywhere.”
The Enduring Spark: Modern Echoes
Why does this particular, almost twee-sounding piece of psychedelia from a band famous for their raw edge resonate so deeply today?
Perhaps it’s the sense of contrast. We expect the Stones to be dangerous and primal. Here, they are vulnerable and sophisticated. This song is the sound of the world’s most notorious rebels briefly attending a finishing school, and realizing they kind of enjoyed the lesson. This unexpected sweetness is powerful.
Moreover, the song’s instrumental complexity—especially that mesmerizing piano part—means that countless aspiring musicians have sought out the sheet music over the years. It’s a deceptive composition; simple in its chord progression, yet utterly brilliant in its arrangement. The intro, a descending chromatic flourish into a major key arpeggio, serves as a perfect earworm, a tiny piece of melodic code that embeds itself instantly in the memory.
It’s a song made for a montage. Think of a rainy drive through a city at night, the neon reflections streaking across the wet pavement. Or the quiet, almost private joy of realizing someone you care about sees the world in a more vivid, spectacular way than you do. The song captures the feeling of sudden, overwhelming emotional brightness, a rush of visual and aural stimuli. The final moments, where the strings seem to wind down, slowing and descending into a dreamy, almost dizzying haze, offer a perfect, fading farewell, like watching a carousel slow to a stop after a brief, exhilarating ride. It’s a magical conclusion to a magical song.
Conclusion: The Unlikely Charm
“She’s A Rainbow” is not essential Stones in the way that “Gimme Shelter” or “Start Me Up” are. It is essential music, full stop. It serves as a vital snapshot of a time when the biggest rock acts felt compelled to embrace their most ambitious, least commercial instincts. For The Rolling Stones, it was a beautiful detour, a fleeting moment of baroque-pop glamour that they would swiftly abandon for the darker, grittier brilliance of Beggars Banquet. Yet, it remains an unforgettable flash of brilliance, a testament to the idea that even the most grounded blues musicians can occasionally step into the stratosphere and capture a perfect, shimmering rainbow.
Listening Recommendations
- The Beatles – A Day in the Life: For a comparable, era-defining use of large-scale, dramatically sweeping orchestral arrangement.
- The Moody Blues – Nights in White Satin: Shares the same 1967 vintage and a similar sense of romantic, Mellotron-driven orchestral grandeur.
- The Beach Boys – Good Vibrations: Another psychedelic-era masterpiece that achieves its emotional resonance through complex, multi-sectioned arrangement and layered vocal textures.
- Love – She Comes in Colours: Released a year earlier, this song shares a similar lyrical theme of a vibrant, colorful woman and a light baroque feel.
- Procol Harum – A Whiter Shade of Pale: An organ-driven, slow-moving baroque piece that uses classical elements to achieve a deep, dreamlike quality.
- Scott Walker – Montague Terrace (In Blue): For an adjacent example of theatrical, sophisticated pop orchestration built around highly literate, colorful lyricism.